It was lost on the night of bombardment before the first landing, lost in the first hour on the beach, lost on each of the two hundred and forty-five days that followed, lost in the planning at Whitehall, lost in the choice of the deranged Ian Hamilton, lost in the luck of getting the genius Ataturk as our principal foe.
It was the largest amphibious operation in world history then and we lost it early and often and five thousand of our men were killed there and ten thousand crippled and twenty thousand sent half-mad with what they saw and survived. Dick Casey, Bert Facey, Clem Attlee, Compton McKenzie, Leon Gellert came home from it and God knows how many young men of equal worth like Rupert Brooke stayed on to moulder in shallow graves and be eaten by dogs and fill the dreams of the girlfriends and sisters and mothers they never came home to, sneaking out in the boats at night in gently falling snow with their mates on Christmas Eve.
It was a bloody debacle and a murderous waste and its failure meant the First World War killed twenty million more young men to no good end and World War 2 came then as a consequence. And I and my father and thirty million subsequent Australians were told it was a kind of triumph.
In a spin exercise as enormous as the one that followed the Crucifixion we were told it was Australia’s ‘coming of age’, the ‘finest sons’ of a ‘new young nation’ proving what we could do – die pointlessly in Churchill’s incompetent conception of a knock-out blow, a back door to victory.
And many of us believed it, the audacious, denialist spin that a battle ill lost from which no good came was worth being in because it ‘tested our mettle’ and ‘showed what game young men can do’.
Paul Keating, launching Graham Freudenberg’s Churchill and Australia said Australia didn’t have to prove anything. It already had the highest standard of living in the world, along with female suffrage, pensions, exemplary health care, a literate working class, good writers, athletes, musicians, painters, cartoonists. What was there to prove? That we could perish bravely in war, that great game of drongos?
‘I have never gone to Gallipoli,’ Keating said, ‘and I never will. Kokoda is more my speed. There we fought, and won, a long battle that made a difference to our nation’s future. That saved us from something, as Gallipoli never did.’
I have often thought since then that Australia’s Picasso, Gershwin, Hemingway, Eliot, Frank Lloyd Wright, Jack Dempsey, Nye Bevan, Clark Gable, Bing Crosby, Charles Chaplin, died on Gallipoli probably, or came home too limbless and smashed of soul to attempt the careers they might have had. Twenty or thirty thousand of their sons and daughters were never born. Two or three thousand of the girls that waited for them only to read their names on a post office wall, never themselves had children, or grandchildren, a hundred thousand of whom might be retiring now after useful, talented, civic lives.
And yet we are asked to celebrate this now, to ‘honour’ a ‘sacrifice’ that ‘had to be made’. It was a battle that should never have been planned and should never have been fought. It gave Turkey a nation-founding hero and us a century of bloodstained hypocrisy, ending hopefully soon.
Death should never be celebrated. It is too big a defeat. It is celebrated by men like Howard and Rudd and Bush and Blair and Bin Laden who do not believe in death and think it only a moment before the story continues, among angel choirs on green meadows with lions and lambs at play together. It is celebrated by pious dimwits, not men and women of intellect; not any more.
Some realism, to be sure, now attends Anzac Day as it didn’t when I was young. It is more a song of mourning now than a hymn of praise. But we would do as well to celebrate with marches and brass bands and bugles and flags the Myall Creek Massacre or the Granville Train Disaster or the Newcastle Earthquake or the Port Arthur Slaughter (on Anzac Day), or Black Saturday, or Ash Wednesday, as we do this holocaust of blood where more men died than at Hiroshima and Nagasaki put together, on both sides, in their youth, in the first of their strength, forever. And are not looking down on us now.
Spin has come a long way since then. We believe almost anything now. That Afghans will want to go back to the valleys where their brothers and fathers were killed, now the ‘situation has improved’. That Sri Lankans yearn to be home among ethnic cleansing. That men and women as brave as boat people are will not be good citizens and should be sent home, like my friends the Bakhtiyaris, to die at the hands of their enemies or join their cause as suicide bombers.
That it’s worth bombing a village to save its women from cruel marriages. That the drug-running Karzai brothers are worth dying for. That it’s worth immolating a country for any cause. That sending young men to gaol is a useful thing to do. That the Catholic Church’s good points outweigh its pederasty. That Christ rose from the dead and hears our every whispered prayer and is interceding for us, every one of us, in a heavenly court right now. That chasing stolen cars does more good than harm. That Sol Trujillo was worth the money we paid him.
Spin lives, and it continues. In our Anzac Day Last Post it lives and marches on. And gathers more and more good people into its great implacable cause, pointless death and needless suffering. Discuss.
Name:
To Bob, a wonderful first few paragraphs. Such a sorrowful meditation sends my mind out on its own elegiac ponderings: we didn’t necessarily need a Picasso or a Hemingway, an Eliot or a Lloyd Wright, what we needed were men, husbands, fathers.
As I type these words I look at my paperweight to the right of my computer printer – a 75mm Ottoman shell head – and I wonder at my own complicity in the act of “remembrance”; is it one of lament or one of anger and resignation that the blood of children came to naught?
What we got was a few decades of broken homes, post stress, nightmares,thugs,alcohol and violence with many having a different and new look at the world.That overhang from the wars and years persists still and many families still paupered and not recovered.
What is more, an entire generation of the British upper class perished on the Somme, at Paschendaele and the like – the upper class Brits were the warrior class, the ones who provided the officers the senior bureaucrats and the politicians.
The ones who would have been the leaders in World War II, and over the years from 1930 to 1960 or so died in Flanders between 1915 and 1918 – a huge percentage of the men born between 1880 and 1900.
Australia lost most of the finest of that generation too, but perhaps a lesser percentage of the high fliers.
Then World War II – and Australia kept reserve occupations – schoolteachers, professionals, farmers, and those essential to the war effort :
(quote)
In January 1942 a Manpower Directorate was established and took over responsibility for the List of reserved occupations. In March 1942 the list was replaced by a Schedule of reserved occupations and industrial priorities. The Director-General of Manpower was able to exempt any person from service in the armed forces; to declare that industries were “protected” and require that a permit be obtained for any change of employment. From March all labour required by unprotected establishments needed to apply for labour through the National Service offices and all unemployed persons were to register within seven days of becoming unemployed.
From the first of April 1942 all engagement of male labour was controlled and a national registration of both male and female labour was completed. The government had the power to say what every man should do whether in the armed services, war industry or civilian industry. The powers under the Manpower Regulations included:
* Power to exempt a person from service or prohibit their enlistment
* Prevent employers from engaging labour not authorised by the directorate
* Restrict the right of employees to engage in the employment of their choice
* Prevent employees from leaving their employment
* Restrict the right of the employer to dismiss his employees
* Power to direct any person to leave one employment and engage in another
* And compel individuals to register and provide information about themselves.”
(end quotes)
The result was that the 8th Division was taken prisoner in the fall of Singapore and that many of them were professional or semi professional men :
During the Malaya-Singapore campaign as a whole, the 8th Division suffered 73% of Allied deaths in battle, even though they comprised only 14% of the Allied forces. Due to Japanese brutality, many died in the prisoner of war camps, and over 2,400 Australian prisoners died in the Sandakan Death Marches. Only a handful were able to escape the POW camps and continue fighting, either as members of guerrilla units or after making their way back to Australia.”
(end quotes)
The fall of France shocked both the Australian government and the people into action. A huge surge of enlistments—some 48,496 in June 1940—provided enough personnel to fill not only the recently formed 7th Division, but to form the 8th Division and 9th Division as well, and the government ordered units to the United Kingdom to assist in its defence.
And so it went.
What an utterly deplorable, contemptible, situation we have here now.
Wit, intelligence, irreverence, and gusto banned and replaced by ersatz emotions and cut and paste contributions!
re. the question of Spin, whose spinning and why is somewhat moot. Is it a stretch too far to suggest a relationship to that emotive word evil?
The book written by the American author, href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._Scott_Peck”>M. Scott Peck, called People of the Lie, was an attempt to understand through example the nature of this phenomenon thing, ‘evil’.
Julian Assange’s contribution to the equation via the exposés of Wikileaks is significant in that we now see revealed the willingness of governments to lie, cover-up, obfuscate, muddle and cloud the raw truths of the results of their behaviours.
The big lie, that as mere citizens we’re not responsible enough to handle the truth and that only governments can exercise enough maturity in the carrying out of matters of state has been somewhat perforated, and we see revealed instead the actions of incompetents and the often appalling results of those decisions in areans of war, finance & economics, environmental policies, geo-political positions and so on. In the general sense for whose benefit are these policies and behaviours promulgated… not the little people, that’s for sure.
Brilliant post and observation Canguro.
Many knew what was going on anyway but now it is confirmed.
I’ve never been in any position for voting to make any difference.